Well there is a lot of scare mongering, but we see this as a huge opportunity for those savvy marketers that know what they are doing.

So let’s look at the facts

  1. Actually 85% of clicks have come from the top 3 adverts anyway, only 15% of people click on the right hand side
  2. The right hand side is now free for Product Listing Ads and Knowledge Panels
  3. The top ads (3 or 4) now take up most of the real estate, at the cost of an organic spot
  4. There are 3 adverts at the bottom of the page

Google have been testing this out for some time, and whilst many will think that they’ve taken this step for commercial reasons, others may argue that actually as the World moves to a more mobile state, this makes absolute sense for those users.

So ours really isn’t to reason why, we just need to make sure that we are doing all we can to maximise a blended search environment for our businesses. Lets take you through this process using the facts above to detail what you should be doing:

Maximise your marketing efforts

  1. You really need to be in the Top 3-4 adverts now and of course those advertisers that were on the right hand side will be jostling for your position. So it will become more competitive. Simply just throwing more money at it won’t work, you need to optimise your campaign and landing pages. If you don’t know how to do this, now is the time to invest in a PPC Consultant to help.
  2. If you do sell products online, now is the time to get Product Listing Ads. You might need help in doing this depending on your website platform, but why not expand your reach using this platform. This is the perfect answer if you sell branded products. Knowledge Panels (or graphs) are slowly making there way into the Serps (just search for any movie star and you’ll see one). You will only get one of these if you mark-up your content, again you’ll need help doing this.
  3. Whilst the organic lists have now moved down, this is irrelevant if the visitor is using an Ad blocker. We have always been advocates of blended search so to maintain organic presence still remains important. On-page SEO will help you achieve this. Another tip here is to make sure that your brand is the ‘go-to’ brand in your industry. Brand SEO is really important these days, and is just another layer of SEO that will help drive customers to you instead of the competition.
  4. No-one scrolls to the bottom of the page, make sure you do steps 1-4 to make sure you don’t end up here.

Your take-away

We can’t tell you exactly what to do because we don’t know your baseline. However, our advice is to Google the best keywords for your business and see if you can find yourself. If your PPC and Organic listing appear, congratulations….keep doing what you are doing (although do keep a closer eye on your PPC over the coming weeks). If you fall short in any area, then focus on that one discipline (listed above) to get it right. Alternatively, if you want help do call on 01273 900242